My Husband Has Died And I Don’t Know How To Move On

Estimated reading time: 18 minutes

Hi Dr. NerdLove,

I have recently been widowed. My husband was/is the love of my life, and as you might imagine, the loss of him is utterly devastating in a way that words will never fully articulate. It isn’t fair, having to work towards a future I never wanted, and have to do it without him.

I’m relatively young. I’m only in my early 40’s, and when I think about what comes next, there are two options that it seems I have to “look forward” to:

A) My husband was it. He’s the One, and the only One I get. So the decades to follow, I will be alone.

B) I find someone else, and fall in love with him.  But he isn’t my husband.

I know the wound is raw, and I know time will change the grief. However, at the moment, both of those options feel horrible right now. If nothing else, I don’t even know how to begin trying to date again. Any advice on how to move forward without disrespecting our past?

Single, But Not By Choice

I am so, so sorry for your loss, SBNC; that’s one of the hardest things that someone can go through and you have my sympathies.

I’ve never lost someone I’ve been in a relationship with, but I have lost a parent and some very close friends, so I understand a little of what you’re going through. And I can tell you that what you’re feeling is entirely normal and natural. It’s not just that the wound is so raw, though it is. It’s that your world has, in a very real way, been destroyed and you’re still dealing with that realization.

None of it is right. None of it is fair. The unfairness of it is so profound that it hurts us to our bones, and the worst part about it is that there is nothing we can do but accept it. And even in accepting it, it can feel like we’re doing something wrong, rather than raging against it for all time. But no fire can burn forever and keeping that particular fire going requires that we burn more and more of ourselves until there’s almost nothing left for the fire to consume, and that’s not something that our loved ones would want for us. Instead, what they would want is for us to live. To continue on. To be happy again.

But it’s just so goddamn hard. So, so fucking hard.

One of the things we never think about when we’re in a long term relationship is how our lives change and merge. This is especially true when we’re talking about a romantic partner, someone we have brought into our world and who brought us into theirs. It’s not just that we have this other person in our lives, but how we’ve changed our lives to accommodate and work with that person’s presence. It changes not just in the way that we’re sharing physical space with them but in the way we become a new person. You’re not just you, you’re part of a new gestalt being, formed of you and your partner, and the way you think of yourself is often as much about “we” as it is about “me”.

And the ways that we incorporate those changes can be so incredibly subtle that we never really think about it. There’s the obvious things, sure – the way you divide the housekeeping and daily chores, the way you factor in their interests and desires and restrictions when you’re both planning meals for the week or taking their schedule into consideration when you’re figuring out what your day looks like. But there’s also the little things that are so mundane, so banal, that you almost take them for granted: the impulse to text them a weird thought or humorous experience, the way the room sounds at night with their breathing and the little noises they make in their sleep. The subtle signs of someone else being around – dishes or the remote being moved just so, the way they used to stack books they were reading or where they would put the mail – things so small that we just never think about them but are thunderously huge in their absence. It’s not just that they’re gone, but there is a hole in the world where they used to be; the negative space that they used to occupy haunts us more than ghosts. Ghosts, at least, would be a presence, instead of an absence, a void, a lacuna in the world.

So you, in a very real way, are having to process that your world – the one you built around yourselves with your husband – is gone, and gone in one of the most devastating ways possible. The idea that you should be looking down the road to getting back on the dating market isn’t putting the cart before the horse, you don’t have a cart and the horse hasn’t even been foaled yet. You are still sitting around in the wreckage of the world around you – if you’ll forgive the very nerdy reference – like Kefka blew everything up and you’re still realizing just how extensive, how complete the damage is. You are having to learn to exist in this new world, one where you see shards of the familiar in the ruins, but where everything is so different and horrible and strange.

More than that though, you have to relearn who you are. You’ve been part of this gestalt whole and now fully half of you is just gone. Like someone who suddenly loses a limb or their sight or hearing, you’re having to relearn how to simply exist in a way you haven’t before. All these little things that you used to rely on without realizing it are gone and now you have to figure out not just what they were, but how you’re going to make them work by yourself.

And of course, there’s simply the echoing, horrible, wrenching loss of it all. The grief of someone so important to you that it seems absurd that the world exists without them and yet the world stubbornly insists on continuing to turn, as though the keystone hasn’t been taken away. It feels almost obscene that the world doesn’t stop to acknowledge this loss, that people don’t pay heed to the way that this vital part of it is just gone.

You are dealing with all of that, and processing this and all the grief and all the pain and the unfairness of it all and that bone deep desire to grab God by the shoulder and just scream at him.

There are times when I don’t think I’ve ever related to anything more than Ray Stevenson  saying “Sometimes, I’d like to get my hands on God.”

So for right now, the best thing you can do is just live. Grieve your loss because it deserves to be grieved. Learn how to live in this new and different and strange world. Discover who you are, now that you have this massive line delineating the time before and time after your loss.

In time, when the negative space is smaller – it will never be fully gone, but it will shrink – and the pain has dulled, there will come a time when you realize that your heart is ready again. Nobody can tell you when that will be, not really; you’ll know when you know, and it will be the right time because it’ll be your time, not anyone else’s. When that time comes and the right person comes, you won’t be disrespecting your past. Your husband was your husband, not some Pharaoh of old, entombing his wife and servants to take them into death with him. Your husband wouldn’t want you lonely, to live in constant misery. He loved you and would want you to be happy again. To smile, to look forward to tomorrow, to hope and dream and yes, to love again.

The day when your heart is available to love again is a day that you will be honoring your past, in part because your past is what makes you who you are. It shapes every part of you and directs your future. Opening yourself up to the sweet agony of love again is possibly the most honest and sincere way of honoring what you and he had. It doesn’t lessen what came before, it highlights it and brings it forward.

You don’t need to try to work towards that day or fear that it’ll never come. Your path of healing is your own and it will take however long it takes. In the meantime, there are many loves that you should be leaning on – philia, the love of friends and companions, storge, the love of family, not just of blood but of choice, and more. Those loves won’t replace the eros or pragma that has been lost, but they aren’t meant to. They simply are a reminder that while this love has been lost, love still exists in the world and wants to wrap you in its arms and reassure you that things will be better.

But for now, your only duty to yourself is to grieve, to live and to heal and to rebuild. The rest can wait. Live in your present for now; the future will take care of itself.

And while I know the pain is still so very fresh and those days feel so very far away – and they are ­– there’s something to remember: there is no One. Or rather, there are many Ones, people who are our Ones because of who we were at the time. As we grow and change, we become different people and so what makes someone our One will change too. We have many soul mates, because our souls aren’t small things; they are vast, vibrant and glowing and capable of holding so very much. To think we could have only one soul mate is to reduce our souls to something so petty small that it beggars belief.

I know the world is a cold and dark place right now; a great love, like a light, has gone out. But even the blackest night will end and the bright day will return. Hope always burns bright.

You’ll be ok. I promise.

All will be well.

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Hi Doc!

Question about asking for reassurance, since you mentioned it in a recent column: how do you ask when you aren’t sure if the reassurance will be there? I (23f) know my boyfriend (21m) loves me, but he’s got major depression so a lot of the time he has no emotions. Half the time he just can’t say “I love you” back to me, because he’s not in a place where he can feel things or he doesn’t have enough energy to verbally/textually express himself. Mostly, I’m okay with this. I know that his love for me shows up in different ways and we have some substitute things he does like sending a heart emoji or squeezing my hand.

I don’t want to be dependent or make him responsible for my emotions when it’s things I should work through on my own like jealousy or insecurity. I also don’t want to make him feel bad for something he can’t control or isn’t able to do for me. Still, there are times when I desperately want to ask for reassurance that he loves me and wants me. I don’t, because when I’m vulnerable like that, it’d wreck me if he wasn’t in a place where he could. Instead, I do grounding techniques, journal, and try to remember specific times or look at screenshots I keep where he’s expressed a lot of love for me. If we’re together, I might ask for a hug. Despite all this, I still feel very lonely and sad at those times. I’m into words of affirmation, so maybe this is a love language mismatch I need to learn to accept — if so, how do I do that?

Additional context: both in therapy, first relationship for both, ldr for summer but same college, so once school starts we’ll be back together, dating for 6 months.

Sad Girls Need Love Too

There is a lot here, SGNLT, and I realize a lot of it is coming from the fact that you’re both very young and very inexperienced, especially since this is your first relationship on top of the mental health issues.

First and foremost, I hope that, in addition to therapy, you and your boyfriend are looking at medication for managing depression. I honestly can’t express how important it is to treat depression from many different angles; talk therapy and CBT can be helpful, but depression is often as much about issues with brain chemistry and talking doesn’t change those. Finding an antidepressant that works for you, in the right dosage, tends to be more art than science, and it can take a while for the medication to build up in your systems before you start to feel the effects. This can make finding the right treatment an exercise in frustration, but when you do find the right meds with the right dosage, it makes all the difference in the world.

And as I’ve said before and elsewhere: sometimes, if the depression is resistant to other forms of treatment, you may have to look at options like ketamine infusion or other treatments. It feels like being on the fringe where actual science and medicine blends uncomfortably with woo, but there’re actual legitimate studies of how ketamine or ECT or some psychedelics help with treatment resistant depression.

The second thing is to understand that love is more than the giddiness and butterflies-in-the-stomach and racing pulse of infatuation. What you feel in the early days of a relationship – and at six months, you are very much in the early days – is what’s often called “New Relationship Energy”, where everything is incredibly intense and powerful and wild. Humans are a novelty-seeking species and our brains reflect that; being in a relationship with a new person causes our brains to produce hormones that go straight to the pleasure-centers. The excitement, the desire to be with each other at all hours, the constantly thinking about one another, the sheer joy of their presence is as much about the thrill of the new as it is about them, specifically; your brain is cranking out incredibly high levels of oxytocin and dopamine because of this new person and this new experience. You are, quite literally, getting high off one another.

Now, I bring this up because this feeling will fade. No matter how intense it feels now, it will start to lessen. This isn’t because you’re falling out of love, or you love each other less than you did at the beginning. It’s simply that humans are incredibly adaptable and any new experience – whether good or bad – inevitably becomes the status quo. With our partners, our brains simply don’t produce those happy chemicals at the same rate because it is now the known, instead of the novel. Those changes aren’t reasons to panic; it’s simply part of the biological aspects of love and relationships.

But that’s precisely what brings me to my next point.

It’s important to recognize that there’s a profound difference between being emotionally exhausted or numb or having a bout of anhedonia from depression and not loving someone. Think of it this way: the world being dark at night doesn’t mean that the sun is gone, any more than the weird demilight of a solar eclipse means that the sun is going out. It just means that the sun isn’t overhead; the world has gotten between you and the sun’s light. The sun is still there, the light is still there, the warmth it brings is still there; you just can’t see it or feel it the same way at that specific time.

So, if your boyfriend loves you, he still loves you even when he’s having bouts of alexithymia. The depression may be eclipsing things in that moment, but it’s still there. It’s important to recognize that, because there are going to be times in the future where some emotions are going to be more front and center than others, including love. You can, for example, love someone to distraction but also be furious at them. Or you can have other things going on in your life where the emotion you’re most feeling in that moment is more present and significant than others. That doesn’t mean that you don’t love someone in those moments; it just means that other emotions are louder or are more relevant.

I say this because his not “feeling” something at a specific instant – especially at a time when his depression is being very loud – isn’t the same as not loving you. He can still express love and affection for you; if he can’t say it, he can still demonstrate it in other ways, just as you can even when you’re sad or feeling low.

One of the things that you’ll learn over time as you get more experience in relationships is that we can still do the little things that help our partners and help maintain the relationship, even if we’re not necessarily feeling it in the moment. That’s not a lie or pretending; it’s simply an acknowledgement that love and relationships are complex and we do things for the sake of our partners because we love them, even if it’s something that’s hard or that we aren’t necessarily feeling in the mood for. It’s part of the give and take of being in a relationship with someone; if we only do the stuff we feel like doing for them when we feel like doing it, the relationship falls apart in short order. It’s not all cartoon birds and cherubs and singing flowers; sometimes it’s gritting your teeth and white-knuckling it and doing it anyway.

(There are obvious exceptions to this, especially when it comes to things that hurt you or leave you feeling violated, exploited or used, but that’s another topic all on its own.)

You should both also understand that depression isn’t a get-out-of-responsibilities card either. Yes, being depressed makes it hard to want to do things. It saps the energy out of you, drains joy from the world and often leaves you feeling either exhausted or just gray. But you still have obligations and responsibilities, including to one another. Sometimes you have to push through and do the thing anyway and if you aren’t thrilled to do it… well, it still needs to be done. And sometimes that means saying “yes, I absolutely love you”, even when you don’t feel much of anything at that moment. Because what you feel at that moment doesn’t mean that you don’t still love one another. Unless that has actually changed – and persists outside of those moments of numbness – then it’s still true and he should still say it. The same goes for times when you are feeling low and he wants reassurance.

Now, let’s talk communication for a moment. One of the important things about love languages and the like is that they’re a guide. They’re about knowing how to express yourself in ways that your partner understands and how they express themselves in ways that you understand. It’s also important to realize that there’s how you express love and how you receive it, which aren’t always the same thing. In your case, you receive love best when it comes as words of affirmation. While this may not be the way that your boyfriend expresses it naturally, that doesn’t mean that he can’t, any more than you could express love via touch or other ways. It may mean that he has to think about it first, or you may have to ask for it specifically, but that’s not the same thing as being unable to give it in that form.

You’ve already demonstrated that you understand this, as you recognize the ways he’s showing love via substitutes. That understanding goes both ways; if you can recognize the substitute, he can express it differently as well, and vice versa. That can be important at times when one of you needs that level of expression in the way that’s easiest to accept. Now, in those moments, what you want is to ask for what you need, in the way that you need it. So if you need reassurance from your boyfriend and you receive them best in words of affirmation, ask for them. If you’re so worried that he’s going to say he can’t tell you he loves you because his depression is waxing instead of waning, ask for affirmation in other ways. Ask him to tell you what he likes about you, what makes you special, things that may not be the exact words you want to hear but that you understand and can take on board because of the nature of them.

It’s a little like the “I love you”/”Ditto” exchange in Ghost; once you recognize what’s behind the words, the intent rather than the specifics of it, it’s much easier to take it onboard.

If you do need those specific words, then ask for them, specifically. It doesn’t mean less or make it less special to say “I need to hear it right now”; the strength of your relationship isn’t measured by or predicated on your abilities to read each other’s minds or to express things spontaneously. It’s measured in the overall commitment you make to one another, in the ways you show up for one another. And if you need him to show up in a specific way, telling him so doesn’t lessen it, any more than saying “I’d really like my favorite meal tonight” makes it any less special than someone preparing it spontaneously. It’s your partner choosing to fill that need, because it’s something you want or require and he wants to provide it for you.

Yes, there’re times when it can feel perfunctory. There’re times when it feels like you shouldn’t have to ask. But doing something because someone asked doesn’t make it mean less; they’re doing it because you asked and because it’s important to you. If they didn’t think that it was important, they wouldn’t provide it. It becomes an issue if you only ever get it when you ask and never any other time. In that case, it’s worth asking if there’s a mismatch or miscommunication going on, or if there’s an underlying problem that’s going unaddressed.

But when you need a little reassurance, even when he’s feeling low himself? Ask for what you need, in the way that you need it. If you can accept it in a roundabout way, great. But you need what you need, so ask for it in the way you need it. Otherwise, your only recourse is to date a telepath and unfortunately, Psi-Corps rounded all of them up already.

Good luck.